Workers' social identity affects their choice of occupation, and therefore the structure and prosperity of the aggregate economy. This paper studies this phenomenon in a setting where work and identity are particularly intertwined: the Indian caste system. Using a new dataset that combines...

We benchmark seven global optimization algorithms by comparing their performance on challenging multidimensional test functions as well as a method of simulated moments estimation of a panel data model of earnings dynamics. Five of the algorithms are taken from the popular NLopt open-source...

We examine the social construction of race during the United States' Reconstruction Era, a critical juncture between slavery and Jim Crow segregation. We show that people with the same detailed skin tone, recorded by the Freedman's Bank (1865-1874), were more likely racialized as White or...

Do natural resources benefit producer economies, or is there a "Natural Resource Curse,"0 perhaps as the crowd-out of manufacturing productivity spillovers reduces long-term growth? We combine new data on oil and gas endowments with Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and gas...

Historical city growth, in the United States and worldwide, has required remarkable transformation of outdated durable buildings. Private land-use decisions may generate inefficiencies, however, due to externalities and various rigidities. This paper analyzes new plot-level data in the aftermath...

The role of good management practices in organizations has recently been emphasized. Do the same principles also apply in government organizations, even the most bureaucratic and hierarchical of them? And can skilled, motivated managers identify how to improve these practices, or is there a role...

Should police activity be narrowly focused and high force, or widely-dispersed but of moderate intensity? Critics of intense "hot spot" policing argue it primarily displaces, not reduces, crime. But if learning about enforcement takes time, the police may take advantage of this period to...

This paper uses detailed data on sequential offers from seven vastly different real-world bargaining settings to document a robust pattern: agents favor offers that split the difference between the two most recent offers on the table. Our settings include negotiations for used cars, insurance...